Two friends have been through medical crises with their children in recent years. Both friends travel. One was home when the crisis happened; one wasn’t.

It’s not always possible to be present, and I (Sam) don’t share these stories to heap guilt on you if you’ve been away from home when a crisis happened in your family’s life. I share them, rather, to illustrate the power of simply being present.

Don writes:

At 7:00 a.m. my phone rang. I was out of town again. It was my wife. She was crying and sounded extremely frightened.

“Honey, I had to take Nick to the hospital early this morning. He had an allergic reaction to penicillin. It was awful. I didn’t know what to do. I called my mom and dad and they came over. We rushed Nick to the emergency room. He couldn’t breathe. He’s okay now, but it was terrifying. I wish you were here. I needed you. We could have lost our son.”

What could I do? I was three thousand miles away. That phrase my wife said has stayed with me for a long time: “I wish you were here.”

Marty writes:

Around 10:30 p.m. I went to check on my three-year-old son, Brandon. Opening the door, I saw immediately that something was wrong. He was asleep, but his face was puffed up like a balloon. I yelled for my wife and we called 911.

Wrapping my son in my arms, I carried him out to the ambulance. He was barely breathing by then. I prayed over him as we raced to the hospital. My wife followed in our car.

When we got to the emergency room, it felt like the doctors took their time getting to him. Maybe this was wrong, I don’t know, but I became this father bear, running around yelling, “My son needs help! My son needs help!”

A doctor appeared who knew exactly what to do. My son’s life was saved from what turned out to be an infection.

My wife was a mess and cried throughout the whole ordeal. While we were waiting for a report from the doctor, my wife put her head on my shoulders and I held her tightly. All she could say was, “I’m glad you were here.”

Sometimes, it’s unavoidable to be away from home. Travel comes up, it’s for legitimate reasons, and it’s well within your responsibilities at home and work to be on the road. Yet it’s also important, as far as it depends on you, to limit your time on the road and be connected to the key relationships in your life.

An ad campaign that dealt directly with the deadly effects of drugs in the lives of children aired for several years. The message was simply, “Just say no.” The idea was to stop an addiction before it started.

This tactic strikes me as a powerful way to deal with the effects of extensive travel as well. So just say no to too much travel.

Setting healthy boundaries

Stopping the pursuit of loneliness is your responsibility. The way to do it is to consciously change the paradigm you use to decide whether or not to take each trip. Perhaps you’re a long-haul trucker or an airline pilot. You have a set route that takes you away from home each week. Your invitation to “just say no” will look different from the one offered to a business professional who has more discretion on which trips he can take or not.

If your job involves a predetermined amount of traveling, perhaps your decision to say no means you don’t take extra work away from home. Perhaps it will mean switching shifts or routes so you spend more time at home. Perhaps, if your life is right on the brink of disaster, the healthiest thing you can do is to take a demotion or even quit your job for a season. In the long run, making a serious and difficult change will be better for you and your family than destroying your life.

At the core, saying no means you learn to set healthy boundaries with your employer when it comes to too much travel.

In the beginning, setting boundaries might feel foreign to you. It takes practice and wisdom to learn how to use the word no correctly. Your boss may not completely understand your reason for choosing to stay home instead of taking that next trip. You may have traveled so long that even your family expects you to go—they’ve all learned to deal with your being away most of the time. But you, and you alone, must break the pattern of loneliness and protect your personal life.

Let’s look at some of the underlying paradigm shifts behind the decision to say no.

1. Ask if a trip is absolutely necessary. The first step to just saying no is learning to change why you decide to take a trip. Depending on the purpose of a trip, how long you need to be gone, and how broken things are in your personal life, you may need to say no to your text trip.

If you learn to say no early in your career and put a limit on the amount and timing of your trips, you can sustain a career that includes travel. But if you don’t set boundaries on the frequency of your trips, the effects of loneliness may become too great to overcome.

You may be at a place where you need to stop traveling altogether. Sometimes you can make this decision yourself. Sometimes circumstances, your company, or trusted family members will need to make this decision for you.

If the decision is made for you, chances are it will be more painful. Likely it means that something has been wrong for too long. You have burned out.

If your company makes this decision for you, it will probably not be out of concern for your well-being. More likely, it will be because your performance does not meet the company standards. This can be the most ironic part of the story. The company you have pursued professionally and have invested the most amount of time in may be where you find the least amount of loyalty in the end. Yet the place where you have invested the least amount of time (your family) is probably where the most loyalty toward you still exists.

We encourage you to not wait too long. Don’t let someone make this decision for you.

2. Ask if a key relationship needs immediate attention. The hard part about figuring out if a relationship is neglected is that when you’re home, problems can often be set aside. But as soon as you get on an airplane, the relationship suffers again.

The solution is to ask important questions of your five key personal relationships and then let them influence your travel decisions. If any one of your relationships—with God, your spouse, your children, your friends, or yourself—needs immediate attention, then you know you need to push back on the amount of time you’re away. Let these relationships influence how much you can travel, when you can travel, and when you simply can’t. When one or more of these relationships is not well cared for, you must say no to a requested trip.

Take a moment to think about how far these five key relationships are from being healthy right now. If major work is needed to heal a broken relationship, then you may need to take a break from business travel for a season. It will be necessary to restructure your business life to not include overnight trips. This could be extremely beneficial in the long run because it will allow you time to invest in the healing process.

Can you really do this? Yes, you can! How do I know? Because this is exactly what I (Sam) needed to do. At the peak of my career, I took a sideways step and spent the time necessary to reinvest in my most special and personal relationships. I never thought of it as doing something crazy. If my personal life and relationships are intact and flourishing, then my business career will flourish all the more. I needed to reorder how I managed my business life in the context of my personal life.

If you are in that place, then push the pause button on business travel for a while. How long you do so depends on you, but you will know when you can travel for work again. For me, it took one full year of not traveling at all. It took another five years after that to find the right balance between business travel and home life. Every trip was weighed through the criteria grid of deepening my five key relationships.

The choice in front of you

The key to business travel is to intentionally manage every business travel request or directive you receive. Let your calendar reflect what you have learned!

There is no place in your life where the stakes are higher and no place where the damage is more permanent than in your personal relationships, and there is absolutely nothing you will regret more than the damage done to these relationships because of too much business travel. Simply put, success starts by scheduling more time at home.

Adapted from Road Warrior Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Arterburn and Sam Gallucci. Used by permission of WaterBrook Press, Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved.

Stephen Arterburn is the founder and chairman of New Life Ministries and host of the nationally syndicated daily radio program, New Life Live!  A popular conference speaker and best-selling author, Stephen has written more than 60 books including The Every Man Series. He lives with his family in Laguna Beach, California.

Sam Gallucci is the senior pastor of The Harbor Community Church. He has extensive experience in the business world as an executive for a customer-relationship management software company. He and his wife, Toni, are the parents of three sons.

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Related resources
Road Warrior: How to Keep Your Faith, Relationships, and Integrity When Away From Home by Stephen Arterburn and Sam Gallucci
Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes
Balancing Your Family, Faith & Work by Pat Gelsinger
No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul Coughlin